[WikiEN-l] The percentage of English Wikipedia articles about living people over time.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 10/16/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Enwikipedia_articles_bios_pct_200710.svg
>
> So what did you do for numbers before [[Category:Living people]] was
> created in late 2005?

Rejoice for the the impossible super-intelligence of hindsight: If an
article is *currently* a living person bio it *always was*.  The graph
doesn't include the last few weeks of data because tagging needs time
to handle new creations.

Obviously this doesn't allow us to count biographies which have since
been deleted... but the hundreds of "Mike is Gay!" bios deleted every
day(?) just moments after creation would probably add enough noise to
make the graph unreadable. :)

As such these graphs provide insight into the composition of Wikipedia
somewhere more so than into the editing practices of the users.

Can someone please explain why Rambot appears to have sparked two
years of exponential growth of *biographies*? :)

I don't recall seeing any appeals to write bios to offset the rambot geostubs.